I'm going to support this motion in spite of what Mr. Komarnicki suggests.
I think Mr. Komarnicki is making a mountain out of a molehill here, not to say that this isn't an important issue and that the molehill isn't important to the students out there and the not-for-profits, particularly, that have to pay them the minimum wage because of the laws that exist within their provincial jurisdictions. Governments always have an ability to move money within departments here and there to deal with things that come up, like an increase in minimum wage, for example.
I know that three years ago when we ran into major difficulty in the summer employment program, and it became obvious that people weren't going to be very happy and that the program wasn't going to be as effective as it had the potential to be, all of a sudden the government found the money. They put significantly more money into that program that year because they had taken the decision-making out of the local area and brought it all the way to Ottawa, under Minister Kwinter at the time. They had left out, had not funded, literally thousands of groups across the country that had typically and traditionally gotten money out of that program to support all kinds of good efforts in the summer, from festivals to tourism events, and not-for-profits that went out there. They decided that the easiest way to deal with it was to actually just fund anybody who had applied, who had been successful the year before, and they found the money for that. There was money within the ministry that was there because perhaps some other programs didn't take up as much of the money as they had thought they would, or they shifted money around. Within ministries there is that ability to make sure that if there is money in an envelope that isn't being needed at the moment or isn't being spent or that is available, they build contingencies in; they always do.
I'd suggest that this doesn't have to be the non-confidence motion that Mr. Komarnicki suggests. What it says to the government is to go back and find the money and to put enough money in there to reflect the reality in provincial jurisdictions where the minimum wage has gone up. I think that's an excellent suggestion and one that will give great support and relief to many organizations out there that are either going to find themselves having to top up with money they don't have in this difficult economy--and I could go into a million reasons why that would be--or reduce the number of people they can hire because they don't have enough to meet the provincial requirement for minimum wage.